The Lake House

It's heavy on romance and light on the time travel

2starsGo to showtimes

Published 5:30 am, Friday, June 16, 2006

You think Romeo and Juliet have it bad: Alex and Kate can't even enjoy a late-night chat at the balcony. Not in iambs, anyway. And not at the same time.

Their problem is one of temporal misalignment. He exists in 2004, she in 2006. They've taken turns residing in the same glass lake house, where they hunger for true love and exchange pensive letters in a mailbox of never-explained magical powers.

In 2006 she writes him a note, pops it in the box, flips up the tin red flag. Pfft, it instantly arrives in 2004. He flips the flag down, reads the note and inserts a reply, flag up. Pfft, 2006. In this fashion the pen pals fall in love, writing of their dreams, their parents, their scruffy dog (one and the same).

Pfft, she's homesick for trees at the lake house. Pfft, he plants a sapling outside her soon-to-be Chicago apartment, which matures two years later (rather quickly) into a shade-giving oasis. With all this pffting around you'd think Alex might ask a few shrewd questions about politics or stocks, but The Lake House isn't concerned with such things. Its one concern is amour. Clutch breast. Flush pink. Sigh.

As a pair, Kate and Alex are oh-so everything: oh-so lonely, oh-so beautiful. They're also oh-so separated by the space-time continuum, which means Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock don't share too many lusty clutches; witness the discreet PG rating, a rare thing for a love story in the age of booty calls.

Alex does manage to track her down in "his" time, when she's tied to a dutiful beau (Dylan Walsh), but mostly their liaison relies on split-screen wizardry and fluent editing (by Alejandro Brodersohn and Lynzee Klingman).

Based on the Korean film Il Mare and gauzily realized by Argentine director Alejandro Agresti (Valentín), The Lake House is unreconstituted mystical bunkum. As bunkum goes, it's not all bad, but it lacks cohesion — and it relies too often, and too lazily, on clichés. There are better entries in the chronicles of thwarted love: Somewhere in Time for era-hopping romance, 88 Charing Cross Road for remote, epistolary yearning. The Lake House twice excerpts the famous ambulatory-kiss scene from Notorious, a classic bit of nibbling eroticism that Agresti might have been wise to avoid. Wedging Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman into the film wasn't exactly fair to its stars.

Still, it does have a few things going for it. One is Alar Kivilo's airy photography, which shows a warm regard for Chicago's broad urban musculature. Another is its reflective cud-chewing on love and the conundrum of timing — whom we can love, when we can love them. (It's a riddle tackled by Jane Austen's Persuasion, much referenced here.) And I suppose it's nice, after all this time, to see Speed co-stars Reeves and Bullock together again, though I'm not sure why the mysterious mailbox mojo chose to reunite them here. Both do their pining-lover best to act depressed.

The film moves toward a spooky coincidence that canny viewers will predict in the first act. I wish I hadn't; it killed all the film's suspense and much of its dewy seduction. "Can this be happening?" asks Alex in an early correspondence, but he got his tenses wrong. It has happened. It will happen. Even without the gift of foresight, the future is in plain view.